


we live on a mountain (right at the top)

by beanierose



Series: intention verse [2]
Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Dolly is a dog, Magical Realism, Multi, also of course, but i'm proud of it and i love stutter a lot, on the scale of self-indulgence this is also right at the top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:09:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24387979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose
Summary: a deleted scene from vernalis. katya, beatrice, trixie and brian spend a quiet, peaceful evening together.
Relationships: Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Series: intention verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1761013
Comments: 12
Kudos: 41





	we live on a mountain (right at the top)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Vernalis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23451748) by [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/pseuds/stutter). 



> i hope by now you all know that i am obsessed with [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/pseuds/stutter). at the end of [Vernalis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23451748/chapters/56215783), the gorgeous work she wrote as a gift for my birthday, the boys sing _Hyperballad_ by Björk. music is something that's extremely important to stutter - it's one of the many many things i love about her - and she set out looking for a _Hyperballad_ cover that sounded a little more like Trixie. she found [this perfect cover](https://open.spotify.com/track/4nrqvmeteRV9IcNwwKSapq?si=fZPZJIf8SyGqVc7TEmcm2w), and when we listened to it she and i and [chappedstick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chappedstick) all got a little carried away, because it sounds so much like Beatrice and Trixie. she asked me to write it, and i'd do anything for her, so this story got born. it slots in neatly between chapters four and five of Vernalis, and it is absolutely necessary to have read both that and [iwoc](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20437604/chapters/48486992) in order to understand it. also, chappedstick wrote an extremely good, extremely explicit offshoot of this universe which you can check out [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24253993). i hope you enjoy!

Trixie is sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with Katya hovering over him, her long delicate fingers occasionally fluttering near his ear or the back of his bald head. Every time Beatrice looks over at them she feels a little sting of jealousy, and she’s not sure who it’s for. The two of them are studying the CD collection. Trixie, earlier, had begun trying to tell them how music works where they’re from. Katya shushed him in the same way she does the kids at school, gently, firmly, distracting him with something shiny.

They’ve settled into it now. Dolly has given up her joyful, circuitous padding around the room and curled up in a shiny knot at Beatrice’s feet. Brian is on the floor with the dog, stroking along her soft snout. When he looks up at Beatrice, the muted gold lamplight in the room makes his cheekbones look severe and stunning. His face is leaner than Katya’s is, and shadowed with regrowth. She looks down at him, and she has the sudden, sharp ache to feel that stubble between her thighs.

“Baby!” she says too loudly. Katya looks up, and the boys exchange a glance as she pads over.

Katya loops her arms easily around Beatrice’s neck and nuzzles in close, scattering little kisses all over her cheeks and nose and mouth. The way she’s standing with one knee propped up on the couch cushion puts her right next to Brian and he loops his arm around Katya’s other leg, pillows his head against her calf.

They take their time. It’s important to Beatrice, that every kiss be meaningful. Every time, it feels like an act of rebellion. She captures Katya’s mouth properly and hums into it, feels Katya’s smile blooming.

“You are the most wonderful woman in the whole universe,” Katya tells her when they separate. “Thank you for being so strong for all of us.”

She doesn’t feel strong, exactly. But Katya and Brian are vibrating at the same frequency, trembling with joy, and she keeps catching Trixie slack-faced and pale when he thinks that nobody’s looking. Of all of them, Beatrice is the most grounded and calm.

She kisses Katya a little more, and then they break apart and Katya wanders back over to Trixie. Beatrice wonders if it’s the same for her, that sudden bolt of attraction like a steel rod driven through the core of her every time she looks at him. She wonders if it’s the same for Brian, too. She thinks it might be, the way he keeps orienting his face up towards her.

“You guys are more the same,” Beatrice tells him. “Than me and him.” She tips her head in Trixie’s direction.

Brian’s familiar eyes get very wide and he scoops himself up from the floor and settles on the couch beside her, fluid and graceful as Katya is. His hips are narrower, his shoulders wider, but she sees it. With padding, the makeup, a wig. She sees it in him the way she doesn’t see herself in Trixie.

“I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says earnestly. “Trixie’s like you. He’s braver than me. He’s determined. He’s prickly on the outside, but he’s real soft and squishy in the middle.”

“Are you saying I’m prickly?”

“His New Year’s resolution last year was to be warmer to people.” Brian lifts one shoulder in something approximating a shrug. His biceps are much bigger than Katya’s, and when he curls his fingers the tendons in the back of his hand flex. “I guess yours was like. . . to get super good at Julienning.”

Beatrice screams a laugh that makes Brian grin widely and squirm around. The others — her wife, his not-husband — they don’t react, don’t even pause in their conversation. When she quiets again she rests her head against the back of the couch. Her hand is palm up against her thigh, an invitation, and Brian starts absently stroking from her wrist up to the tips of her fingers in long motions. Beatrice feels warm and pleasantly loose-limbed from the wine she and Trixie drank earlier, standing up in the kitchen like a pair of teenagers hoping not to be caught snooping in the liquor cabinet.

“I’m soft with her,” she says. When she raises her head to look, Katya has folded herself down onto the floor and she’s leaning over Trixie’s shoulder with one hand resting there for balance. Beatrice’s heart feels ripe and fragrant, sticky-sweet. “I’m- she makes me feel gentle. Is he like that?”

She’s asking, but she’s seen it. The way the boys orient towards each other. They were hardly subtle earlier, while Beatrice and Katya cleaned up after dinner. _You got a minute to sneak off with me_ , Trixie had said quietly, and Katya had turned to Beatrice at the sink with this wry little look. If they’d asked, Beatrice supposes they could’ve shown them the guest room. Stranger things have happened. Stranger things have happened in this _house_.

“He is,” Brian says, drawing Beatrice’s gaze back to his face. “I get the very best of him.”

“I think you bring it out of him. If you’re like her.”

It’s funny, what that does to Brian’s face. They’re so alike, but he’s more shy with his heart than Katya is. He ducks his chin, instead of raising his face to hers and beaming the way Katya would.

Something Katya has said has Trixie cackling out of his own skin, and Beatrice turns to look at him again. She can’t help it. It’s peculiar to see her same mannerisms in him, see him pinch his septum when he’s trying not to laugh at something, the way he throws his head back when he does laugh. He’s beautiful.

Beatrice turns back to look at Brian and says, “Does he ever look like me? Or does he always look like. . . that?” Brian crows a laugh, delighted over that. “That makeup, I mean. Does he ever try to look pretty?”

“He’s the most beautiful woman in the world, and he’s the first to tell you that.” Brian is wriggly on the couch the same exact way Katya is. Beatrice thinks about the first weeks they were together, how she had to fill Katya’s belly with something warm and rich and then eat her out real slow so that she’d settle for the evening. She wonders if that works for Trixie, if he’s ever tried. “He did do a, like, a soft beat, one time. I saw the photographs. He said he wasn’t sure who that girl was, but actually. . . she looks like you.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Beatrice says softly. It’s strange to think about. Brian and Katya seem like they would fit neatly inside each other’s skin, but Trixie is full where Beatrice is hollow.

“Hey,” Brian says. “Can I, like. . . could I hug you?”

Beatrice snorts, but she doesn’t stop him when he shunts across the couch and wraps his arms around her. It feels really good. She likes the heat of his bicep against her cheek and the day-old smell of his cologne, the way his large hand cradles the back of her head. She closes her eyes and rests inside of the moment a while, listens to the soft murmuring of Brian’s low voice. He’s saying something in Russian that she tries to commit to memory, so she can ask Katya later. Once they’re gone.

 _On skuchal po tebe_ , he says. _On skuchal po tebe_.

“Oh, work!” Trixie says loudly. The two of them break apart guiltily and Beatrice clears her throat, presses her hands to her warm cheeks. “Brian, look what they got.” He’s waving Björk’s _Post_ CD at them and grinning.

Brian launches immediately into an impression of Björk that has Katya wheezing and shaking her fists in the air. Beatrice feels a sudden wash of tenderness for her wife and opens her arms, waits for Katya to come fold herself into her lap. She burrows in, her arms looped around Beatrice’s neck, and presses a loud, smacking kiss to her cheek.

“Is this, like. . . this is _new_ for you,” Brian says, in his normal voice.

Beatrice snorts, and Katya gives her a little look. It’s strange not to be on the same side, to have somebody that Katya feels she needs to protect from Beatrice. “It’s been out for seven years or something, if that’s new,” she says.

Brian opens his mouth like he’s going to say how many years it’s been, where they are, and Katya says firmly, “Don’t, _moya vedmachik_. Don’t tell us.”

“Right, sure. Of course,” Brian says, thoroughly chastened.

Trixie seems to realise that he’s become stranded alone and he gets up, lollops lazily over to them still clutching the CD. It’s so like Dolly that Beatrice has to hide a laugh against her palm. There’s not room on the couch, not really, but Trixie perches half on the arm and Brian deflates against him immediately.

Katya is nuzzling at her cheek, squirmy from all the excitement of the day, and Beatrice turns her head to kiss her properly. She can hear the boys murmuring together, low and conspiratorial, but she lets herself relax against her wife. It’s good to be still, good to feel calm now that they have a plan in place.

When they break apart both the boys are watching them. Katya lets out a loud, two-tone shrill of laughter that makes Dolly jolt and eye her warily. She says, “Sorry, _milaya devushka_ ,” and Brian mutters the translation for Trixie.

He's been anxiously opening and reclosing the CD case. He seems fascinated by it in a way that suggests to Beatrice the technology might be obsolete, where they’re from. She knows it’s grating on Brian’s nerves because he has the same little indentation in his forehead as Katya, rubs a palm against the back of his neck in the same way.

“Hey, Tracy, why don’t you go get your guitar?” he says very suddenly, too loudly, and Katya jerks in Beatrice’s lap. “It’s right in the trunk.”

“You sing?” Katya asks, open-mouthed to let all of her joy come spilling out. Dolly has clambered to her feet and recommenced her patrolling of the room, pushing her wet nose into each of their palms in turn to check in.

“I do,” Trixie says, like it’s nothing, but Beatrice sees the quiet pleasure in him, in the little tug at one corner of his mouth. “We’re still figuring out how to blend it into our show, since this one hates music.” He nods at Brian, who goes immediately pink in the ears.

 _“Brian!”_ Katya says with genuine horror. “You hate music?”

“I don’t hate music!” Brian shrills. He looks to Trixie, who shows him both palms and shakes his head. “I don’t always love, like, live singing.” He scrunches his face up in just the way Katya does when she knows she’s said something Beatrice isn’t going to like. It makes her want to stroke his smooth round head, kiss his cheeks, tell him she’s not mad, baby.

Trixie is laughing, and he has one arm draped heavily over Brian’s shoulder like a felled limb, his hand splayed against Brian’s chest right over his heart. Dolly has looped back around and is resting her head in Brian’s lap, and he smooths his thumbs over her eyebrows.

“Beatrice,” Trixie says, and she lifts her head from where she’s resting against Katya’s bicep. She feels good, warmed from within by the wine and by having the three people that love her most in the universe right here. She blinks and gives Trixie a sleepy hum, and Katya chuckles right in her ear. “Do you sing?”

She opens her mouth to answer, but Katya is already loudly saying, “Yes! She does, you should see her in the shower.”

“They should _see me_ in the shower?” Beatrice repeats. When she glances over at them, both boys are pink in the cheeks and refusing to look at her.

“Hear you. You know what I meant, baby.”

She does, and she stays quiet while Katya extols her virtues to the boys. Beatrice grew up singing and playing guitar with her grandfather, out on the back porch in the muggy Wisconsin summer. She lost the skill when she came to Los Angeles, didn’t have the time to do anything other than flop, exhausted and still in her chef’s whites, onto her bed and knock out for a couple hours without even pulling the sheet over herself. Since she’s been here, since she’s loved Katya, there’s been more time for leisure. She’s just been too ashamed to find out how bad her guitar has really gotten, and it’s put her off ever getting her hands on one again.

Trixie goes out to the car to get his guitar, and Brian goes with him like it isn’t even a conscious decision, like Trixie moving out of his sight is a physical pain. Beatrice understands that, especially today. Katya moving even into the next room feels like a small, sharp yank in her stomach. While they’re outside, Katya slides off Beatrice’s lap and bounces a couple times on the couch cushion beside her.

“Hey,” Beatrice says. Katya chuckles and says _hey, baby_ back to her. “It’s gonna be okay, right? We’re gonna get them home?”

“Course we are,” Katya says easily. Her face is smooth and calm, so lovely, and Beatrice manages to nod. It feels easy to trust Katya, easy to leap after her with her eyes closed.

Dolly is standing so close to the door that her snout is squished, and when the boys open it her whole body leaps. She runs tight little circles around them as they come back and settle in the living room again, Trixie in the armchair this time with the guitar across his knees.

While he tunes it, and familiarises himself with the opening chords to the song, Katya says, “Brian, honey, could you light the fire?”

He looks helplessly around the room, and Beatrice knuckles his shoulder, gestures to the basket of kindling they keep beside the fireplace. “It’s there. You know what to do, or you need the resident bumpkin to help you out?” Beatrice flicks her eyes over to Trixie for a half-second.

Trixie’s fingers come to a skidding, discordant halt and he squawks at her, “Bitch, I’m _you!_ ” Brian and Katya dissolve in a rapture of giggling. When they laugh, they sound exactly the same. Beatrice’s heart gets full, spills over.

“No, baby,” Katya says to her. “He doesn’t need the stuff. He’ll just light it.”

“Oh, _baba_ , no,” Brian says. He’s shuffled across the floor so he’s in front of the hearth, and Dolly has followed him dutifully over and offered herself, belly-up, for scritches. “I can’t do that. I’m. . . _ya splyu_.” He lifts both hands, helplessly, and lets them drop into his lap again.

Katya goes to him, lays her gentle hand at his shoulder. When he’d seen the tattoos on her fingers earlier today he had screamed and snatched her hand right out of the air to inspect them more closely. It’s fun to see how many of their tattoos mirror each other. Beatrice would like to see Brian undressed and find out how alike they are. She asked Trixie earlier if he has a heart-shaped freckle on the back of his shoulder. He had stared at her for five whole seconds and then said _I have a birthmark on my collarbone_ , and she’d tugged down the neck of her sweater to show him its twin.

“You can do it,” Katya is saying to Brian. Her voice is gentle and calm and certain, and Beatrice sees it move through him, sees him set his shoulders. “Remember what we practiced earlier? _Namereniye, moya vedmachik_.”

They’ve talked about it some, Beatrice and Katya. When it gets late and her brain gets elastic, Beatrice likes to hear Katya talk about her magic. That first, awful night in Katya’s kitchen — _their_ kitchen, now — she’d described herself as connected to the earth, talked about herbology. It still doesn’t really make sense, and thinking about it for too long makes Beatrice’s head get fuzzy and filled with static. One time, she’d told Katya that she couldn’t understand how just intending something so fiercely to happen could make it become true. Katya had kissed her exasperated mouth and said, “Isn’t that sort of what cooking is, too?”

Brian settles cross-legged in front of the fireplace’s dark mouth, his knees flat to the floor in a way that makes Beatrice’s hips ache in sympathy. He’s holding both hands up and turned outwards and it’s so reminiscent of Katya lighting the Halloween bonfire — her responsibility annually now — that Beatrice has to suppress a laugh. It comes out anyway in a little huff that makes Trixie turn his head toward her, his eyes still on the clumsy work of his fingers at the guitar strings. It’s not necessary, the theatre of it. The artifice. But maybe it helps Brian, to focus his body towards it, all of that tightly-coiled energy he’s humming with. The way Katya’s aunts wield their abilities isn’t the same, either. Every witch has to develop her own practice.

When he first starts out, Beatrice averts her eyes to give him some privacy. She watches Trixie, trying to figure out the chord pattern for the Björk song he wants to play for them. He’s been grumbling under his breath about not being able to _just look it up_. Beatrice keeps telling Katya that they should get a computer for the house but she is fiercely against it, convinced that the electromagnetic field will mess with her abilities. And, well, neither of them knows for sure whether that’s true or not.

It’s nice, to rest her cheek against the back of the couch and look at Trixie’s scrunched-up, goofy, familiar face. She likes the susurration of Katya and Brian’s low voices together in that peculiar mix of English and Russian and something else entirely. Dolly is made uneasy by them and she pads over and hops right up onto the couch, settles herself in Beatrice's lap after a moment of instinct-circling. She strokes the dog’s glossy head over and over, two fingers smoothing along the entire length of her snout, up and down, up and down.

Whenever she does glance over at Brian, he seems to be in actual pain. There’s a beaded line of sweat down the side of his face and he looks wan and pale, his mouth tugged down at the corners in a grimace. Katya stays right by his side, firm and steady. He does some movement with his hands that makes a strange burst of energy move through the room, and he lets out a little yelp.

“You good, girl?” Trixie puts his guitar down carefully on the armchair and goes to sit on the floor at Brian’s other side.

It’s exhausting, Beatrice knows. The night Katya had saved Peter’s life, they’d just barely made it home. Beatrice had had to help her up the stairs and put her into bed. By the time she returned with a mug of hot tea, Katya had been out cold with Dolly’s long, slender body tucked in against her. She’d slept twenty-six hours. Beatrice had gone home briefly to check on the goats and chickens — she’d left Dolly watching over Katya — but she’d spent most of that time curled up in the chair in the corner of Katya’s bedroom, wondering whether she would ever wake up again.

“I’m sorry, _baba_ ,” Brian says. He’s slumped against Trixie immediately, and his eyes are closed. “I can’t. _Eto bol'no_. It hurts.”

Trixie levels Katya with a firm look, and says to Brian, “It’s fine, honey. You don’t have to do it. You’ve done enough today.”

Beatrice feels a strange flare of protectiveness over her wife, but Katya pats Brian’s knee, and says easily, “That’s okay, you’ll get it. More tea?” She gets up and heads for the kitchen, disappears inside. Brian’s shoulders have come up and forward, and one of Trixie’s big hands is resting at his thigh.

“Baby,” Beatrice calls out.

“Oh, right!” comes Katya’s voice from the kitchen, and a fire roars into life in the grate with a loud pop. Trixie screams and falls back, catching himself with one hand thrown behind his body. Brian stays right where he is, looking at the flames with little-kid astonishment.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Katya says when she comes back with four steaming mugs and sees Trixie’s pink face. “She used to do that every time.”

Beatrice accepts the mug her wife puts into her hands and turns her face up towards Katya’s warmth, accepts a kiss, too. The boys are less tactile, she’s noticed. Like they’re shy. She finds that strange; where they’re from, it’s safe now.

“I used to do it every time because there was never any _warning_ ,” she tells the boys. The way they both look at her, twin round faces gazing up from the floor in rapt amazement, makes her chest feel tight. She’s not a witch, she hasn’t travelled through time. Until this morning, she was just _Trixie_. “Sometimes she’d light it from upstairs, or the end of the garden.”

Brian crows a laugh, thrilled over that, and Trixie meets Beatrice’s long-suffering sigh with a little smile of his own. It’s not the same, but. . . he understands what it’s like to love this person just as well as Beatrice does.

For a little while, they all sip their tea and warm themselves by the fireplace. The colour is coming back into Brian’s face now, and he no longer looks like Trixie is the only thing keeping him upright. Katya is wandering aimlessly around the space like she does, occasionally picking up tchotchkes from their shelves and examining them as if they’re brand new to her. She’s so beautiful. Beatrice feels, still, like she’s getting over the shock of looking at that Polaroid and seeing somebody else wearing her wife’s face.

Eventually, Trixie says, “I think I got it.” He gets up and relocates to the armchair. Beatrice goes to him, feeling a little tug low down in her belly, and settles on the arm with her sock feet tucked beneath Trixie’s thigh.

He starts to play, and Beatrice watches the delicate, certain work of his fingers on the strings. When Trixie starts to sing, Beatrice’s eyes shutter closed and she lets her body tilt further towards his. Katya has stopped roaming, and on the floor in front of the fireplace she is so close to Brian it’s like she’s trying to climb inside of his skin. Their heads are resting against one another, and Dolly is sprawled out across both their laps, her tail thumping lazily against Brian’s thigh.

Katya has sung this song enough times, played this CD often enough in the kitchen in the evenings, that Beatrice knows all of the words. She lets Trixie get through the first verse, and when he reaches the chorus she starts singing, too. The harmony comes easily to her, their voices blend smoothly together, and Trixie turns his pleased, surprised face up to hers.

It feels miraculous. The witches are hushed on the floor at their feet. Brian looks blissful, and Katya leans in to say something to him that’s too low for Beatrice to catch. He nods back at her, and orients his body towards the hearth a little more. One hand held out towards the fire, Brian closes his eyes again. The flames leap towards his fingertips, crackling and spitting little sparks out of the mouth of the fireplace. He gasps and whips back around to look at Trixie, whose fingers don’t stumble at all on the guitar strings.

“Did you see, honey?” Brian says loudly enough that it makes Dolly lift her head and eye him. Trixie’s still singing, but he nods a handful of times and grins at Brian. “I did it,” he says to the room at large, and Katya throws her arm around his neck and presses a smacking kiss to his cheek. It makes him go pink in the ears immediately. The right one has the same little folded over point at the top as Katya’s does, and Beatrice feels so suddenly tender towards him that she forgets to keep singing.

Trixie finishes the song by himself, and when he’s done the three of them all applaud him. It makes him bashful and he sets his guitar down carefully on the floor, leaning against the side of the armchair. Katya comes to him and holds out both of her hands until he takes them, so she can tug him to his feet and collect him into a hug.

He’s so much taller than her that it looks kind of nuts, especially with the way she’s thrown her arms around his neck. He stoops to accommodate her, and his big hands land cautiously at her back. Beatrice is just a hair taller than Brian, and Katya is so tiny in the room with the three of them.

“Thank you,” she tells Trixie, so sincerely that Beatrice feels like a voyeur just looking at them. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard my wife’s pretty voice.”

“You could’ve asked me any time,” Beatrice huffs.

Katya scoffs right into Trixie's face. “Oh, you would have said yes? That seems in-keeping with what I know of you and your character, sure.”

She’s right. Beatrice mutters a little grumble under her breath, and Brian comes over to her. He takes one of her braids in both hands and starts absently threading it around and through his fingers, and she just lets him do it. It feels so strange to have three people’s affection, three people who want to be near her. She likes it. She could-

She likes it.

Later tonight, they will all try to get a little rest. Beatrice’s brain is four steps ahead, mapping out the logistics of who will sleep where. The witches are going to need to be together, and looking at the solid wall of Trixie’s chest makes her mouth dry. She wants to sleep with him beside her in the bed, wants just one night where she doesn’t have to kick the sheets down to the end of the mattress and peel her sweat-soaked tank top away from the skin of her back.

“Oh, _moya vedmachik! Vykhodi!_ You want we should look at the moon? I’ll teach to you a ritual.” Katya’s exhausted, her syntax scrambled in the transition from Russian to English. It’s endearing, makes Beatrice’s chest feel puffed-up and glowing cartoonishly red.

The two of them, Katya and Brian, squeeze together through the back door and out into the night, Dolly behind them like a shadow moving through water. Trixie goes back out to the car to put his guitar away and Beatrice collects their four empty mugs and leaves them in the sink to wash later. She meets Trixie again in the hallway, and she follows him up the staircase and into bed.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) if you'd like to chat! i really would love to hear what you thought about this one - it's the most avant-garde thing i've ever done. and please, if you haven't yet - or even if you have - go leave a comment on Vernalis and tell stutter she's a genius. i hope you're all safe and well ♡


End file.
